Money Minute Thursday 5 September: new car registrations

In the UK, we get data on new car registrations for August.

In July, new car registrations were down by 4.1% year on year.

One factor boosting car sales in recent years has been the flood of payouts from the PPI scandal.

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With the deadline for PPI claims now passed, car sales may continue to struggle.

In the US, we get the weekly jobless claims numbers.

This measures the number of Americans joining the dole queues for the first time each week.

Claims came in at 215,000 last week, and have been broadly flat for about 18 months now.

History suggests that when claims start trending higher, a recession is on the way.